When you google for the worst games ever, chances are that the E.T. game for the Atari 2600 will be mentioned. When it is mentioned it usually also mentions that the game was responsible for the videogame crash of the eighties and that Atari has had thousands of unsold cartridges buried in the New Mexico desert. Whether that was true, was doubted regularly.
I have to admit that when I received the game as a kid I actually had a great time with it and finished the game various times. The game consisted of holes you had to drop yourself into to find parts of phone you could use to finally “call home” and be taken by the spaceship. Atari: Game Over looks at the history of the game company itself, but also wants to investigate whether those cartridges were indeed buried in the desert.
Why the game has gained such a notorious name it becomes clear quickly if you realise the timelines in which the game had to be made. It is almost impossible to understand, but there were just five weeks to realize it, which of course is unrealistic. The man responsible for making it was Howard Scott Warsaw, who talks about him working on it together with other big names in Atari history, among which the founder of Atari, Bushnell.
The documentary manages to present the history of the company and the game, even for those who don’t know any of it, in a clear way. Slowly it works towards the excavation and see if the legend really happened and also if the game really was responsible for temporarily killing the industry. For those who actually were around when the Atari 2600 phenomena happened it is a nostalgic trip, for others an interesting history lesson. It is possible to watch the movie for free through Xbox live or the Xbox site.
Haha I heard about this when the new Mexico dig was underway, and thought it was an interesting concept. I’m not a gamer in any sense, so knew nothing about the Atari legacy (other than they produced PacMan, right?) but anything where a single game can bring down a technological juggernaut like Atari has to be worth a watch, even for vicarious human hubris.
I don’t know if they produced Pacman, since it is originally a Japanese game. I think it is a interesting doc to watch even if you don’t know much about gaming as it gives a good recap.
Oh, that’s interesting. I never knew they made a doc on this. I was fortunate enough to have Nintendo when I was old enough to play games, so I missed all of that, but I think I’d like to see this. Great review!
It’s free to watch, although I’m not sure if you need an Xbox live account.
I REALLY want to see this. I too remember getting ET as a kid but I had a slightly different reaction to it. I found it frustrating and I never played it much in one sitting.
I grew up playing Atari and I distinctly remember the video game ‘crash’. I remember my dad coming home one day with almost 30 new Atari games. It was the greatest day. What I didn’t realize was that he got them from a store which was begging to get them sold. The prices had plummeted and stores were dumping their games. In other words the crash had hit.
Head on over to Xbox video and you can see it 🙂 I know what you mean about it being frustrating and whenever I played it I changed the settings so the agent would never come and you only had to get everything before time ran out.
I don’t remember the crash, but my father bought quite a lot of games for me. I still have that Atari 2600 and years later I bought a box with probably close to a 100 game cartridges in it. It’s now sitting in a box somewhere in the house and I know I’ll never play that console anymore…but nostalgia makes me want to keep it.
I grew up when the 2600 was the hottest thing in the world besides food. Therefore, I need to see this. I never got the E.T. game, but my best friend did. If I remember correctly, he thought it was okay, but didn’t play it much. I tried it once or twice and didn’t care for it. Id actually never heard the New Mexico story. I’m intrigued.
Yeah, if you were around when it was out this documentary will bring back a lot of memories 🙂